Yamaha A-S301 Integrated Amplifier - Silver

I was putting together a separates stereo system a mix of vintage kit and new amplifier and cd player., This amp in silver finish fits in so well with my vintage silver faced separates and I managed to get the last one for this price, after I bought it the price shot up by a fair few quid , I only paid £229.00 , someone figured out that the silver faced ones are more popular with us vintage stereo people and jacked the price up to have us over for preferring silver to the cheaper black option .This being said it is a great amp, with more than enough power for my needs, It is driving four mission 70 mk2 speakers and they all sound spot on, it is a physically large bit of kit but I like that , it fits in well with 60's and 70's kit, I could be made more pleasing to some of us vintage lovers if it had a couple of analogue V.U meters on the front as well , it is not as if there is not the room for them and they would really set this amp off and it would match in even better with my tape deck and tuner, I bought a new amp as I could not be arsed to have to change capacitors and transistors on a vintage amp and being a Yamaha I had every confidence that this would sound good, I have not been disappointed, I love the clear sound of this amp even if I have not been able to use more than 1/2 volume in an 18 x 12 room as beyond that it is too loud to be in the same room with it and I am worried that if driven much higher my 40 year old speakers might decide to detonate. all of the controls are smooth and have a nice sturdy feel to them, The Pure direct button is good if you want to hear how the sound engineers decided a cd should sound as it bypasses any tone preferences you might have set up and reverts to pure untampered with sound. In all this is a clean looking ( but could in my view benefit from the previously mentioned V.U meters ) big old beasty of an amp with a shed load of inputs , hell you can even connect it via coax and optical cables , as well as loads of RCA connections, a word of warning though when connecting speakers you cannot use nice gold plated chunky connectors on the posts of this amp as you need to strip about 10mm of insulation off of your speaker cables and push it onto the connecting post then you screw the plastic post cover down to clamp it in place so the connectors I bought before the amp turned up are now expensive unused ornaments ..brilliant amp, good price ( when I got mine ) yes I would whole heartedly recommend it

A good midrange integrated amp with a phono and digital input, sounds to me to be acceptable at the price point and we are now nearer to the sound quality that was so much missed on other (more expensive) devices recently.Some might argue that it sounds far too "well behaved"You will probably not see better build quality for your money.I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this if you only need 60 + 60w RMS, it can handle 4 ohm speakers as your A set (selector at rear) For running two sets of speakers together you need two 8 ohm (or above)pairs.Also I'd recommend it for people who have neighbours to consider as bass is not super heavy and dominant.It has very low distortion and is super quiet with admirable channel separation.The variable loudness control tends to attenuate mids the further left it is turned,i'm not noticing a significant rise in bass-when the amp is turned up high a little movement to the left can improve the overall balance of frequencies to my ears.Headphone out is top notch.Turned on full with no signal input, there is absolutely no noise i can detect except obviously on phono input,which is never quiet on any amp.Ordered Saturday,Arrived Sunday with Prime,Amazon have been great over Christmas.This Will NOT suit people who want a really bass heavy WINDOW WARPING foundation wobbling output.This amp is powerful but pretty flat frequency response wise, but it does sound very natural - it has a specific preamped RCA sub bass out if you want to add a dedicated amplified subwoofer unit.So extra Bass can be added if you crave it, to your own specification and budget.I'd perhaps consider going up a model if you want more a forceful output.A Power Saving switch can be selected at the rear to put this amp in standby should you forget to turn it off after 8 hours.Do not expect performance on a par with a 1990's top of the range technics or Rotel amp, this sounds somewhat deliberately restricted bass wise (but not compressed then bass limited) it's more as if a tuned circuit subharmonic filter is selected,which will help if playing vinyl and stop feedback from the turntable pickup and platter.I think the DAC sounds nice in it, it's balanced and true to real human vocal tones. But you are not going to run a nightclub with this amp,so do listen to one if you can first.For what I paid I feel it was worth my money.If you don't have a massive room to fill,it should suit fine- but try to get some sensitive decent speakers as this act alone will make you far happier - it can go quite loud but importantly it has far more detail than home cinema amps made of plastic and sprayed with gunky gloss to look like glass and thus dark/mysterious (with little soul)This is the 'baby' of the 3 new yamaha amps and it weighs 12KG packed.Is all metal and looks retro with a circular motor driven volume knob. Mute when pressed does NOT fully mute the amp,but turns it down enough to talk to someone.I would suggest it suits classical, folk and electronic music best.It's pretty good connected via optical from a pc using itunes as well.I'm not a big fan of direct mode as my ears need a little more treble and bass at times, I understand that direct signal route is the shortest route to the power amps.I have listened using pure direct and i don't enjoy my collection of music as much on that setting, but i'd definitely select that for an optical in from a tv or digital box - you really get very well defined mids for dialogue if it's playing tv,often tv sources have been re equalised post production to sound punchy, no additional treble is usually required from broadcast or blu ray film type audio.Direct mode may suit use late in the evening if you fancy using speakers instead of phones but don't want to wake anyone else up.My own hearing range stops at 16.125K so it maybe why I need more treble compensationIf you can audition this against a few other models, do it in a showroom and find what suits *your* ears, you may find you prefer cheaper or far more expensive amps depending on how amps are tuned today, which I find is a world part from how they once were.There was a time where £300-500 guaranteed customers a wideband "monster" of a hifi amp, but these often would blow their output stages and frequently - I was the guy making a very good living out of that kind of misfortune.Of course i'd take a Rotel or top of the line class AA Technics over this, but i think this is good for people who got sucked into buying an unsatisfactory 7.1 system and are not happy tripping over speakers and haven't got much change left to get by to purchase something that sounds somewhat more real and true to life on the stereo setting.There are days when i love this amp and days when I started to feel i was missing out on something, top end goes beyond the human hearing range - so what on earth was i missing? - power bandwidth or am I far too used to old top of the range gear from years ago that amplified 10Hz-100Khz (but equally also fried their output stages pretty often because of that very wideband approach- that the transistors and psu simply could not handle)I had then to remind myself this is not a £1000+ amp it's £250!This amp won't blow up so easily , but you do loose a little in the bass area to ensure this, it won't damage a good quality pair of 100w speakers like some cheaper or home cinema amps can and will happily do.It's also not the kind of amp that attacks tweeters adversely.I'm not sure if this is my imagination playing tricks on me, but i think it sounds better if left on at least 30 minutes!If you are using a surround amp for your stereo output only and can jump across to this, I don't think you'll be disappointed until you can afford a true beast of a machine,if that is what you require.

It is not possible to adjust the tone controls by the remote control. Returned for refund.

This is budget gear but it’s solid for the price. I don’t touch the bass, treble etc in fact there is a bypass function which does just that and is meant to give a more direct sound. I adjust speaker position and tonearm setting to tweak the sound. But to my eyes/ears it looks and sounds great with a vintage vibe. I just have a MM cartridge set up but I bought the YBA11 blue tooth dongle - excellent.The UK version doesn’t take banana plugs and the screw connectors are bunched together and struggle to accommodate thick speaker cable. It has loads of connectivity if you need that (not Bluetooth tho)

Wanted this to run some old Cambridge Audio separates through, I like the Wolfson chips so the internal DAC in the Yamaha wasn't really relevant. Quite fortunate really as the Burr-Brown one in the amp is terrible, I tried it with my wiim mini just to hear it. Quickly reconnected my DacMagic and RCA cables for the streaming 😁 The pure audio pass through function is nice too, I use it until late evening then switch it off to my preset EQ to not annoy the neighbours. Running it into some 3030i 6ohm speakers, sounds great. Only 4 stars due to the DAC, but at this price that's probably being too harsh.